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9,398 days have passed since
December 22nd 1978; a warm winter's day in Chichester that marked
my debut on this planet. Approximately 3,000 days have been wasted
sleeping, countless days have been spent in the bathroom and not
enough days have been spent with my wife. During those 6,000 days
awake, how many times have I seen a world changing moment that
made me exclaim, "Wow!"?
My personal definition of a 'wow moment' needs to meet the following
criteria: you need to have experienced and understood it the moment
it happened, like watching the moon landing or Live Aid. You need
to have been a part of a craze or fashion the first time it appeared,
like The Beatles, Elvis or Star Wars. You were part of a generation
to witness technological discoveries, like flight, television
or even horseless carriages.
Some of these become 'wow moments' in retrospect but they are
experiences that nobody else could ever go through, unless they
had a DeLorean with flux capacitor. My point is that today there
are fewer and fewer opportunities for these moments because they
no longer come as a surprise. We expect faster cars, trains and
planes, we simply wait for the next computer hardware upgrade,
travel into space is no longer deemed news worthy and musicians
are heavily influenced by past musical genres.
What's left that can be original and awe-inspiring? Perhaps one
of the areas that still impresses me are cinema special effects,
but the danger of directors, such as George Lucas, adding new
scenes, characters and backgrounds with the latest sfx developments
means that our nostalgia is being distorted.
Perhaps I am being pessimistic or just had a bad night's sleep
- which happens occasionally out of 3,000 - but I feel cheated
out of the good stuff. I was awoken with the news that Princess
Diana had died but was too young to enjoy the Royal Wedding, I
wasn't born for Neil Armstrong's walk but saw the Challenger explode,
my Dad tells me about the great days of 1970's football but I
only recall Hillsborough, the Bradford City fire and the pain
England's football team regularly causes.
There was news recently that many people my age are hooked on
nostalgia. They are watching DVDs of favourite childhood shows,
they are remixing hits of the 80s and 90s, there are crazes like
Rubik's Cube and Gameboys making comebacks, and let's not even
mention fashion. Is this desperate grab for our past inspired
by an uninspired future or an unsurprising future? Cloning will
happen, flights from UK to Oz in two hours will happen, cures
will happen, wars will happen, things will always happen, but
that is no surprise - is it?
Today we have clichés, we have Elvis impersonators, we
have Michael Schumacher making history but most are too annoyed
to notice and my football team still have not won anything for
decades. 'Wow moments' may be very rare but I suppose if they
did happen all the time then they wouldn't be so, err, wow, would
they? If you want three, then the ones that immediately come to
mind are the 1999 solar eclipse, Greece winning Euro 2004 and
proposing to Päivi. That should a few people happy…
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'Wow!'